Facebook’s Emotion Manipulation Linked To DOD Research On Civil Unrest

Facebook website pages opened in an internet browser is seen in this photo illustration taken in Lavigny May 16, 2012. Facebook Inc increased the size of its initial public offering by almost 25 percent, and could raise as much as $16 billion as strong investor demand for a share of the No.1 social network trumps debate about its long-term potential to make money. Facebook, founded eight years ago by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room, said on Wednesday it will add about 84 million shares to its IPO, floating about 421 million shares in an offering expected to be priced on Thursday. REUTERS/Valentin Flauraud (SWITZERLAND - Tags: BUSINESS SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY SOCIETY) - RTR325LN

Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer ran the “emotion manipulation” study to test whether or not emotions were contagious across users on the social media platform over the course of a week in January 2012.

The recently published study detailing the experiment explains how Kramer and two other researchers from the University of California and Cornell were able to successfully alter users’ moods positively or negatively by curating the content in their News Feeds to highlight uplifting or depressing content.

A host of ethical and legal questions have been raised in the wake of the disclosure, along with a collection of new details, including the fact that Cornell University researcher Jeffrey T. Hancock received DOD funding for a related study called “Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes.”

Cornell is currently receiving funds for another project titled “Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions.”

“This proposal focuses on the analysis and empirical modeling of the dynamics of social movement mobilization and contagions,” the project description reads. “For each dataset, they propose to use information retrieval and sentiment analysis methods to identify individuals mobilized in a social contagion and when they become mobilized.”